Windows – Bootcamped Windows 7 boots to black screen with no cursor

boot-campwindows 7

The specs

  • MacBook 13", mid-2010
  • nVidia GeForce 320M
  • Partitions:
    • Macintosh HD (27.5 GB free of 179.2 GB)
    • BOOTCAMP (5.72 GB free of 70 GB)
  • Windows 7 SP 1
  • RAM: One 2 GB stick, one 1 GB stick, both 1067 MHz DDR3
  • Installed applications:
    • 64-bit:
      • Boot Camp
      • CCleaner
      • GIMP 2
      • Java Runtime 7
      • PeaZip
      • Rainmeter
      • TeraCopy
    • 32-bit:
      • BIMP Lite
      • Glary Utilities
      • Google Chrome
      • KeePass 2
      • Mozilla Firefox
      • Notepad++
      • OpenOffice.org 3
      • Skype
      • Steam (plus five games)
      • VLC
      • WinDirStat
      • WinSCP

The problem specifics, and what I tried

  • The computer boots fine and shows the "Starting Windows" screen. The screen goes blank for a moment, then my pointer appears, then the screen goes black again for good. There's not even any backlight.
  • F8 works fine. Safe Mode with Networking works fine.
  • I booted into Safe Mode and installed the newest GeForce 320M driver, 320.49 WHQL. The problem persists.
  • I went to "Repair Your System" from the F8 menu, then used the startup fixer and the RAM checker. Both found no problems, and the problem persists.
  • Lastly, I tried a fix off the Tom's Hardware forums: booted to safe mode, created a new admin account, deleted the old one, and rebooted normally. The problem persists.

This is a problem that has persisted with my computer, after multiple clean installs. I want to make sure it's not just something I happen to be doing over and over again after I get Windows installed, hence the program list.

Best Answer

It would seem that Nvidia's GeForce 320.49 driver is bugged. I developed the same issue after updating from version 320.18 on Windows 8 with an Nvidia 330m (using their GeForce Experience auto-updater. Worked until I tried to boot back into Windows a few days later.). Reverting to the 320.18 driver appears to have fixed the issue for me (I had to use System Restore, as Windows 8 doesn't offer an easy way that I can see to boot into Safe Mode without having access to Windows 8's settings).

GeForce Experience is still offering to install the 320.49 driver for me, but I can no longer find reference on Nvidia's website that this driver was released out of beta on 7/1 as GeForce Experience reports. Since I remember seeing it as the recommended version on 7/2 (when I saw this question and went to update my Windows partition), I can only guess that it has been pulled, and looking through the Nvidia driver forums makes it sound like the driver had other issues (I can't find a good source for this problem specifically).

320.18 appears to be the recommended version currently. Hope that helps.

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